Monday, August 31, 2009

Quick "Twutorial"

Late last week I received a Photoshop question via Twitter. It was an interesting question but rather than attempt to answer it in 140 characters on Twitter, I've created the following quick "Twutorial" that answers the question, (and lets me tag this blog post as another "Technique of the every so often")

The question was, is there a way to scale (Transform) a layer and a path at the same time.The quick answer is no, but thankfully there is a way to do it very quickly and easily thanks to a keyboard shortcut.

If you have the layer selected in the Layers panel and the path selected in the Paths panel, and then press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) only the path will be transformed.

Instead, deselect the path so it's temporarily not visible, and use Free Transform to scale the layer.Then in the Paths panel click on the path to activate it.

Press Command-Shift-T (PC: Ctrl-Shift-T) to "Transform Again", meaning Photoshop will scale the path using the exact same values as when you scaled the layer contents,

Quick and easy! So although you can't transform a path and a layer at the same time, this shortcut takes the guesswork out of scaling 2 things the same amount.

(For those people who like to see techniques like this in motion, I'll post a link to a video version once Vimeo finishes uploading it)

P.S. I can't promise that I'll always be able to answer questions like this, but I thought this one would be of interest to lots of folks